Wednesday, January 25, 2006

The Kierkegaard-Habermas Debate

2 comments:

Anonymous
said...

Loving Danish

Well, Westphal doesn't show a very accurate understanding of Habermas' sense of things. I wouldn't recommend the article to someone interested in Habermas---Kierkegaard maybe. (In fact, the 8-year-old article is largely about Kierkegaard.)

One should ask, by now, how valid is Habermas's reading of Kierkegaard, in chapter 1 of The Future of Human Nature. Maybe pretty valid. In any case, there's the location of an issue of "Kierkegaard-Habermas debate."

-----------------------

So, today, the Habermas Forum has been obscenely hacked. It just reminds me that childish vandalism is stupid. If ever there was an advocate for respect toward Islam in Europe, it is Habermas. But the Islamist radical has no time for understanding that tolerance goes both ways in a modern society. The whole "Danish" affair would make Kierkegaard turn in his grave.

Habermas is a German philosopher -- "the leading systematic philosopher of our time," Richard Rorty of the University of Virginia calls him. But Habermas comes to this debate as much more than just a philosopher. "In terms of range and depth there is no one close to him," says Thomas McCarthy, a professor of humanities and philosophy at Northwestern University. "Habermas has been able to go into discussions in political theory, in sociology, in psychology, in legal theory -- in a dozen different disciplines -- and become one of the dominant voices in each one."

About Me

I am a philosopher by training. I wrote my PhD dissertation on Habermas and the possibility of transcendence from within. Beside Foucault and Habermas, I am interested in the work of Robert Brandom,John McDowell, and Charles Travis.